Stuffed Avocado

As I just got a “bing” from WordPress telling me that I now have 600 followers, I thought that most of them have not seen my earlier posts. This is my way of showing my appreciation to all my blogging friends, both old and new. Thank you for stopping by, thank you for reading, for your likes and follows, and simply for being a part of this wonderful supportive community – the blogosphere!

When you hear stuffed shirt, you get a mental image of a retrograde, an inflexible old-fashioned conservative, maybe an arrogant poseur with no substance. The latter is probably the closest to the truth, as the idiom was actually born as a literal description of a scarecrow, dressed in real person’s clothes and stuffed with whatever was on hand to create the shape: hay, paper, rags… In other words, no substance. It has done its job, however, scaring away not only crows, but also other potential enemies of the crops.

Scarecrows have existed for millennia but they had not always worn shirts, stuffed or otherwise. In Ancient Egypt, the fields were devastated not by crows but by quail. Inventive farmers would install wooden construction wrapped in nets. Stupid quail would get themselves tangled up in those nets and end up as a farmer’s dinner. Talking about killing two birds with…